Customer Reviews

Roget’s Super Thesaurus (Rogets)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

While it seems a bit strange to be writing a review for something like a thesaurus, I have to say that this is truly an excellent book, the finest thesaurus in my office (and as a writer, I have many). I kept this by my side during my latest project and used it constantly. A particularly interesting feature is the Word Find that appears for some entries...in addition to synonyms, the book provides a lengthy list of words that relate to the entry. (For example, when you look up "Desert," you'll learn, among many, many other things, that in the desert you might see "Phantom Rain," which is rain that evaporates before it hits the ground.) A neat little feature you won't find in your usual thesaurus. Overall, an excellent reference tool, and highly recommended for everyone, not just writers.

Although a great thesaurus in book form, this is not set up well for the kindle. The only way to move through the book is with the Search this Book or FIND feature on the kindle. This takes you to locations where your desired word may be but not to the word itself. Very frustrating to use! A waste of $10.00. Very diasppointed.... all it would need is a search built in similar to a dictionary. Again, a great Thesaurus but not for the kindle.... too bad!

This book is actually a fairly exhaustive Thesaurus. It is 663 pages of common, specialized, and even slang words that have been defined, cross referenced, and alphabetized. The entries also consist of the type of word (i.e. verb, noun, etc.), notable quotations of uses, and what this book calls "reverse dictionary," which lists the words by their definition first, incase you know what it is and not what it is called (as the back cover totes). The entries gives the reader both synonyms and antonyms. There is also an introduction that helps the reader to understand how the book is organized and how to most effectively use this reference work. This book has been a big help in my school research. I highly recommend it.

I bought the ebook version and it is a joke. Look up the word cat via "book search" and you end up with 30 or more locations of the word or start from content and you have to page through many pages before reaching the word cat. Paper version may be good but ebook sucks!

Do not buy this thesaurus for your kindle. I neglected to notice that most, if not all, of the higher rated reviews for Roget's Super Thesaurus were for the paperback edition. I quite concur with the reviews for the paperback edition.

I needed a light weight reference to carry with me. However, the Kindle edition of the thesaurus is not at all user friendly. There appear to be only two ways to find a word in the Kindle edition. Go to the first letter of the word and then laboriously turn the pages until you reach the word (many times slower than turning pages in a paper edition).

Alternatively, you can spell out the word using the search function. However, the result of the search gives you not just the synonym or antonym that you want but every occurrence of the word throughout the thesaurus wherever it may appear, and you may have to again laboriously page through dozens of pages before you find what you are searching for.

It was taking so much time to find a word that I gave up and went back to my trusty paper copy of a thesaurus.

This was such a disappointment.

This is just another of many alphabetical thesauruses. The reverse dictionary is a joke. There are reverse dictionary entries (WORD FIND) against a small fraction of words. If you want to look up something you have to guess the word it will be under eg if you need to find out "spontaneous abortion" is called "miscarriage" you need to guess to look under "pregnancy". If you want to find "anorexia nervosa" from "dieting to the point of emaciation" you need to guess it will be under "neurosis". You would do better with one of the better crossword dictionaries.
When the title started with Roget's I expected something taking you from general words to specific words as Roget does, as Glazier in Word Menu does and as is done in WordNet, a free program by Princeton University available on the web. If Roget was still around he would sue. Then to add Superthesaurus makes you really expect something out of the ordinary. The quotations are a waste of time. I have "The Synonym Finder" by Rodale and it has many more synonyms and is a better book.
This book starts with a misleading title and then adds in quotations for some words and WORD FIND for others. It seems to be trying to do many things without any real notion of what it is trying to achieve. It may well be a good book for professional writers but for the average user I would give it a miss. I might not have bought it myself if I was able to view the sample pages. Since Amazon changed to its new "look inside" format my browser closes with a message to send details of the fault to Microsoft.

My favorite feature of this thesaurus is it's thoroughness. It not only gives you the synonyms, but also antonyms, quotations relating to many of the words and a word-find reverse dictionary! This is a must-have for any writer. It's pushed most of my other reference books to the back of my bookshelf. I pick this one up each and every time I write.

The content is good and it's easy to look up words, however this advantage is lost because the print is too small and the spine breaks immediately with normal use and the pages fall out. I'm not happy with this purchase.

First of all, let me reiterate that I love words. I enjoy using thesauri and dictionaries to look up words. For many years, I had several dictionaries and thesauri on my shelf. Recently, I have found several online sources for dictionaries, but have not been able to replace my Super Thesaurus.

The book is organized cleanly. Information is easy to find and read.

"Super Thesaurus" would make a great gift for a beginning writer in grade school or a college bound freshmen. I would highly recommend this book for word lovers of all ages.

This thesaurus is not setup to be searched the way its printed counterpart can be. In the printed version, you open to the index, find the word, and reference the sublisting that best relates to its meaning. I expected to be able to do something similar with the Kindle version, but you have to search the entire book for a given word which gives you a list of completely unrelated references. Completely unrelated!!!

Until the Kindle version allows you to do a "word search" using the brilliantly organized index reference the way you can with the printed version, this is a colossal waste of cash. Spend a little more money and buy the printed version, which is itself an invaluable addition to ones reference library.